Don't toss that

When you know slang words in other dialects of English, some things are unintentionally funny.
[Source]

A bank killer of a financial move

In November 2021, I refinanced the mortgage on our Hawaii house. We locked in a 1.99% interest rate on the remaining principal (~$590k) for 30 years.

Fast forward to today, and Republic First bank has gone gone into receivership. Why? Because in 2021, "Previous leadership invest[ed] heavily in long-duration securities with low fixed interest rates." As interest rates have risen since then, those securities have declined in value.
Then, in 2022, Republic First "grew [its] jumbo mortgage portfolio at below-market interest rates." Although our refinance was through a different lender, that very well describes what we did to the bank we refinanced with. We locked got a fixed, jumbo mortgage at what is now a below market rate. Not just below market, but below the current inflation rate.

Whether or not that situation is widespread, or if it represents a serious threat to the banking industry, only time will tell. Regardless, it represents one of the few time, to paraphrase Danny Ocean, when I've had the perfect hand, and I've bet big, and taken the house.

Paris trip Day 1

With our hotel in La Défense (Paris' business district), we started our with a trip to the nearby Westfield Mall, where I saw an ice cream store that sold Bubbies -- a fond reminder of Hawai`i.

We then took the Metro to the Arc de Triomphe... ... and walked past the Mission Catholique Italienne de Paris which is next to the Noura Traiteur café We walked to the Bateaux Mouche dock on the Seine ...
... and then to the Eiffel Tower. We thought about going to the top, but took one look at the long lines and noped out.
From there we walked to the Hotel des Invalides ...
... then north to the river, where we would see the Grand Palais, the obelisk France received in 1829, and a Thomas Jefferson statue.
We went past the Mazarine Library ... ... caught sight of Notre Dame and the Palais de Justice, and then called it a day. After about 7 hours and something like 30,000 steps, we'd seen enough of Paris -- at least for the time being.

France trip #6

My first trip to France was in April 1992, to the Haute Savoie region. My second was later that same year, in July -- I went to Lille. My third was to Paris in December 2001 (prices on airline tickets following the 9/11 terrorist attacks were low).

My third was in March 2023, as I drove my family across the Grande Est area. The fourth was October 2023; we did a simple, four-day weekend in Strasbourg.

You may think that's plenty enough, but for spring break this year, I prevailed on my family to visit Paris. We took the S-bahn train into Frankfurt, and then an ICE train from there to Gare de l'Est.

A trip to the consulate

While the U.S. is (generally) cool with dual citizenship, South Korea is not. When my wife naturalized in 2017, she had to go to the Korean consulate in Honolulu to de-register.

Our kids, however, did not -- they don't have to choose which one to keep until they turn 18.

There's a catch, though. Once a young man turns 18, he can't de-register unless he's served his mandatory [unpaid] military service, and a teenager who waits too long puts himself at risk of being drafted. This has happened to Korean-Americans who gone to Korea to teach English.
So today, my kids surrendered their South Korean citizenship at the consulate in Frankfurt. Not just my son, but my daughter as well -- given the country's collapsing birth rate and lingering security risks (looking at you, NK) the SK government has considered expanding the draft to include women.

If in the future my kids want to live or work in Korea, they can apply for an F-4 visa (same as my wife) but as of today, they'll have to use the "foreigner" line at the airport.

"A pirate's life for me"

Someone opened a school for pirates here in Germany.

What is the purpose of history class?

Is it to weed out the “vocational” students from the “college prep” kids? Is it to keep you from being embarrassed in public, like what Jay Leno used to do?
Or is it to impart the wisdom necessary to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?

If it’s the first, we’re in a good spot. As Woodrow Wilson put it in 1906, “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class … to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” Over 115 years later, that’s pretty much what we have. [Source]

If it’s the second, we’re not doing so well. Case in point -- 56% of Americans think we shouldn’t teach Arabic numerals in school. (Those are the ones that go 0-9). [Source]

And if it’s option #3, we’re completely failing. George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” [Source]

But repeating the past is *exactly* what we do. The best illustration of this is how we treat the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Consider this quote from Gerald Ford on page 512 of Texas' official history textbook:

“The lessons of the past in Vietnam have already been learned – learned by presidents, learned by Congress, learned by the American people – and we should have our focus on the future.”

What’s astonishing is

1. There’s no discussion of the context in which Ford said this, nor any countervailing opinion,
2. There’s no discussion about what the lessons actually are, and
3. Ford’s blithe dismissal of history is found … in a HISTORY book!

Let’s start with the context.

1.) The South Vietnamese capital of Saigon had fallen to the North on April 30, 1975.

2.) A few days earlier, Americans saw pictures of desperate South Vietnamese climbing onto rooftops, trying to escape the city on helicopters that could take them to U.S. Navy ships just off-shore. The USS Midway's flight deck was so crowded, the crew resorted to pushing helicopters over the side to make space. [Source]
3.) Ford said this on May 6, 1975, during a press conference in which he dismissed Congress’s idea of a study to establish those “lessons of Vietnam,” which he considered "divisive." His quote was in response to the question, "Don't you think that we can learn from the past?"
4.) Ford's comment was lampooned in political cartoons like this one by Doug Marlette. [Source]
Putting the past behind may have been politically expedient at the time, but by failing to remember the past, we doomed ourselves to repeat it, and that’s exactly what happened in 2021 as we left Afghanistan with a very public timeline for our departure. [Source]

But again, events overtook us, and again, the American public witnessed images of desperate people – those who were the most welcoming of the American presence – forced to flee their own country. [Source]

We ignore the lessons of history to our own peril. We could have learned from the past, but we didn’t do it then, and we’re not doing it now. It's far easier to teach the simple fact that Ford said those words than examine them in any detail.

But don’t worry – if history is any guide, there will probably be another chance in the future to learn the same thing ... again.